Show HN: TaskUp.com - the only task list you'll ever need | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TaskUp.com - the only task list you'll ever need

taskup.com

28 pointsaioprisan50 comments

I love the pricing scheme. Most web based services start at several dollars a month (probably because of card processing fees) or an expensive yearly signup. For a simple task app like this, I would not pay several dollars a month and a yearly lump sum would be 'risky'.

I know the service provider is probably paying a huge % of card processing fees though. I wonder if there is a service that would handle 'subscription micro-payments' for cheap services like this (eg. combine all your micro-payments onto one bill to save fees)?

We're not fans of paying several dollars per month for a task management service either. Do 14-30 day free to paying trials work? That's out #1 plan for now. We find the $9.99/year price point attractive, with $0.99/month it's not worth it and we'd rather give the service away for free. There are micro-payment processors out there but we're looking at overall cost and strategy when looking at pricing plans/feature set we'd like to make available at each price level, and really love the simplicity of Stripe for payments.

For me, trials only work if the price point at the end of the trial is attractive. Personally I would probably be more likely to sign up at $1.50/month than $9.99 / year.... I know its crazy, but it just seems less risk. I really think you should keep the low monthly cost option.

I feel like every single task app is marketed as the last one i'll ever need, yet they all differ on one or two very small features. I wonder how many man hours have been wasted building task management applications.

I'm not trying to discount this app, I am simply hoping that at some point there will be a de-facto winner that will actually help me become more efficient. The start-up cost for most of these hasn't proved worth it.

Notational Velocity + Simplenote Sync + Dropbox as a redundant backup = my current winning combo for managing both thoughts and things I need to do.

Seriously. There's just an overload on task apps.

We're aiming to make TaskUp.com the oen you'd use everyday, I hope you'll give it a try. What are the killer features that you see from Notational Velocity and Simplenote Sync? We're working on providing multiple cloud storage backends in the future, it's a version 3/4 feature right now (2-3 months away). As far as time spent to get this up and running, we've been working on this project for 2 months now, got some funding, and will be working to get out features that people actually want and use in the next few months, with several major features each month. We will publish out development roadmap and give out users a chance to vote on the features they'd like to get developed, but you'll need an account for that :)

We're committed to making TaskUp the best damn task and project management app you've ever used because we've also used dozens of different systems over the years that either weren't flexible, simple, portable, extensible, or secure enough for our tastes. Your input in helping us craft this is very valuable to us!

I took a look at it and nope... I'm still going to have to build my own task list.

Not to take any wind out of your sails, but Task Lists are one of those seemingly low hanging fruit where there's a lot of space for opinion as to what the UI should be like.

I'm quite surprised more task list apps are coming out, I would have thought the market was over-saturated by them.

I'm also surprised HN doesn't advocate for a very good tast/list manager: www.checkvist.com, which can be entirely controlled via the command line and offers a ton of features (note: I am only a user, not an employee).

checkvlist is excellent and we're going to release a project management level feature that lets you group tasks and set up inheritance as well, coming out in the next few weeks!

Care to share the name so I can keep an eye on it?

It will be part of TaskUp.com, just another feature

Task List apps occupy this interesting position in which, in the long run, it's easier for developers to build the thing (tweaking one or two costs/benefits) than for users to switch to using it.

Other things in this category include: web browsers, acne creams, computer mouses.

Looks great! One suggestion would be to change your pricing from $0.99/month to $11.99/year. Assuming you're going to use Stripe, you will be charged $0.65 in credit card fees if you charge yearly instead of monthly, which will cost you $3.94 per year. Since the service is so cheap, I doubt you'll see much price elasticity between the two price schemes. Even if you do see lower sales, you'll likely still end up making more profit because of the reduced CC fees.

We love Stripe and have the payment piece ready to go but we're still trying to figure out the different plans. Good point on the monthly/yearly pricing. The hosting costs are so pretty small so that even with millions of tasks, a user would only use a few MBs of storage, so instead of making a few cents per user per month and nickel&diming our users, we'd make it free for personal usage and try to monetize via other sources. Any thoughts/experiences/requests on the feature set and price points? What would you pay for a task list management system? What about a task collaboration platform (think multiple users collaboration, comments on tasks, file attachments etc)?

1) Looks very similar to http://www.orchestra.com/, which is a good thing IMHO. 2) What's missing from Orchestra is some analysis. Like, you have completed X number of tasks so far, basically to keep me motivated 3) Your app wouldn't let me delete any tasks. Chrome / Mac OS X Lion.

1) Thanks, they have a pretty nice app as well! 2) Latest Chrome? Did you try it after a refresh? You can also delete multiple tasks by pressing Ctrl and selecting the tasks, then pressing the red trash button on hover on one of the tasks.

Tangentially related to the parent topic- I have grown to appreciate "tasks" in Outlook mostly because of three features 1. the ability to flag an email as a task 2. ease of right click and adjust follow up date "today, tomorrow, this week, this month etc". 3. attach/link emails and other docs within tasks, so I can group related material together (OK mostly needed because Outlook search isn't as good as gmail :)

I only use Outlook at work and while I'd much rather use gmail for mail management I do want those features for task management- without mail integration any task list is not quite there. (I process my inbox to empty as I find email makes a very poor task manager despite the vast numbers of folk who use it as such...)

Edit: just found you can do 1. above in gmail, open the email and hit "shift+t" it includes a link to the email.

This is a nice looking site. Two points: (1) The "Simple," "Flexible," and "Powerful" rectangles on the front page look like buttons; and (2) is the standard advice: connect your features to benefits on your "features" page. Some seem ok, but some aren't clear to me.

Tasks

Organize your tasks with simple, feature-rich todos. Tag the, set priorities, due dates and notes, all in one.

What benefit is this? "no more fumbling around with multiple pages when dealing with a single task. One task- one page." ... or some such prose.

Security

All of our ...

...so your data is safe even if you log in from a public venue.

Thanks for the feedback, we'll definitely work on the wording. Yours definitely sounds better :)

We're trying to build an experience where users are confident that the service is secure (both SSL and client-side, for the truly paranoid), easy to use, and flexible enough to work the way you want it, not changing your process to fix in the system's mold (i.e. tasks via email, notifications, data import/export, analytics, collaboration).

Also add a favicon. Your current one 404s. https://taskup.com/assets/img/ico/favicon.png

A favicon.ico file in the root is always a good idea

It's not that my wording is better- I don't mean to be changing yours, just adding. The thought pattern is to tell the user why each feature is important to them. Don't make them guess. Don't allow them to guess. Manage, as much as you can, their mental state while on your page.

Looks like a pretty well-designed offering, and I appreciate the focus on security. However, to get me to switch from Things (or Remember the Milk, etc), it'll first need to match those offerings on all levels, and then offer a killer feature on top of that. (e.g. I'm in love with the Things iPhone app, so you'll have to match that level of design). Collaboration and analytics sound potentially very interesting though, so I'm curious to see where those go.

I sometimes question how much room there is for competition in the todo list space, but I guess competition is always a good thing. Good luck!

My "killer features" for a task list are daily recurring tasks so before I go to bed I can scan the recurring tasks and say "oh yeah, forgot to water the plants!"

And also calendar integration. To me an appointment really is just a task with a very firm deadline. I'd like to see appointments mixed in with my task list. But I'd want to be able to keep using my main calendar app (Google Calendar in my case)

We have a calendar tab and full calendar integration coming out in a few weeks, so recurring tasks and calendars are out #1 priority, feature-wise. We'd love your feedback when it's live!

sweet! If you guys get those in consider me a customer. Looking forward to the updates.

Is there a mobile version yet? This looks pretty cool, but if it's not mobile, I would venture to say it doesn't meet most people's needs.

Question: Does it sync with any other task lists? Like Google Tasks or Astrid? Are you planning on doing that?

Funny story: A while back I was messing around with the Windows Phone SDK and I started a todo list app which I named "TaskUp". I did a search on the various app stores to make sure the name wasn't taken. I guess nothing lasts forever..

Yes, that's part of our version 3, import/export from various providers as well as calendar tie-ins!

It's not feature complete yet but for our first beta we've got a pretty awesome interface fully functional with notifications etc. All task changes are versioned and later this week, the unlimited undo functionality will be live, as well as client side encryption on top of the SSL encryption. Mac and Windows apps coming next month!

This looks really nice.

I have used several todo lists, and found them all too complex. I made a little bash script called badoop at https://github.com/jergason/badoop if you prefer command-line apps or TaskUp isn't bare-bones enough.

Thanks for the feedback! We have both an API and command line interface that will be released in the next month. We want to get people to use TaskUp as much as possible without getting in their way and a CLI is something that I find myself using from time to time as well. We'd love your feedback on our CLI if you'd be interested in checking it out!

If you use zsh, 'ztodo' is distributed with at least 4.3.11 or later. It's not a unified task list, but a per-directory task list.

Doesn't handle my use case - lists within lists. Workflowy does this excellently, and I'm not switching to anything that doesn't do it at least that well.

(If you don't care about hierarchical lists then this site looks pretty though.)

Version 2 coming out September 15th will have project management features, with lists within lists, task child-parent inheritance, and other project-management style features. We're still working on refining that piece because we want the UI to be very intuitive and we've scraped 2 designs so far because it wasn't intuitive enough. Getting this piece correctly is very important to us and I think we've finally got it figured out. We'd love your input when it's out to see what you think!

I'll happily take a look then!

(As an example of how I use it, here's my wedding planning list: https://workflowy.com/shared/b5d25b0b-c9e3-b573-deb5-cc552d9... )

I have been using Workflowy for many month now. Its not perfect. But it has served me well, longer than any other list application. The list app I like best is org-mode in Emacs. Sadly it is not in the cloud (and requires Emacs). TaskUp.com looks really polished. Good Job.

Thanks for the feedback! What feature(s) would get you to use it on a daily/weekly basis?

I like the name. Can I add a few items to your taskup? [ ] The Business Plan mentions a Grow Plan, but it's not on the pricing page. [ ] I think it's a bit unfair to call the Unlimited Plan "Popular" when it's not available yet.

Will get it fixed today, thanks :)

...or just use pen & paper and put the paper in your pocket. Stop wasting time on dainty todo lists and start building something ACTUALLY worth talking about.

I've been fairly happy with GQueues. The lack of nested tasks is a killer for me for taskup, but I see you commented elsewhere that that feature is coming soon.

Indeed, that's coming soon :) Hopefully we'll get you to try it out on TaskUp!

I prefer http://trello.com, it's free for ever and it's works in Android / iPhone.

Fair enough, trello is pretty great! TaskUp is more of a GTD tool and each task is a single item vs the multiple boards/cards view. We don't currently have the multiple projects functionality live but when it's out, I hope you give it a try and give up some feedback! Different approach, you have to use the one that you're most comfortable with.

App looks slick. How about multistep tasks?

That's the one thing that keeps me with Toodledo.com

Coming in the next few weeks, we're testing out that functionality as we speak :)

How is this different from Flowapp?

Website renders horribly on iPhone

Nice app - good luck brother

Thanks! :) What did you like and didn't like about it?

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